16 December, 2014

World’s Rarest & Most Valuable Gems

They said that diamonds are a girl’s best friend… right? Throughout history, humans have adorned themselves with jewelry – first made from bits of shell, bone and sparkly rocks, and later, with gems set in copper, silver and gold. Nowadays mainly women can’t live without their special sparkle. It takes millions of years for crystals to form in nature, and only a fraction of those will ever be found, mined, cut and sold as gemstones. The value of gemstones depends on many factors, including rarity, quality, setting, and even politics. Dig in to the world of incredibly expensive jewels with our selection of the world’s rarest and most valuable gems.

Named for Tsar Alexander II of Russia, this exceedingly rare gemstone was thought to be mined out after the original deposits, found in 1830 in Russia’s Ural Mountains, were nearly exhausted.

Alexandrite is a color-changing gemstone: its hue shifts from red to green depending on the light it’s exposed to.

Recent finds in Brazil, East Africa and Sri Lanka have brought this stone back on the market, but it is still one of the world’s most coveted stones.

Jadeite may sound like the various semi-precious stones known informally as “jade,” but this incredibly rare gem is many times more valuable. Prized most when it is colored a deep, translucent green, Jadeite is mainly found in limited quantities in Myanmar.

In 1997, Christie’s auction house sold a Jadeite necklace for nearly $10 million. The highest quality “Imperial” Jadeite can sell for millions of dollars per carat when cut and polished. Sadly, many traders have passed off color-treated stones as true Jadeite.

The rarest type of Opal, the national gemstone of Australia, Black Opal is also the most valuable gem of its kind. Almost all available Black Opal comes from the Lightning Ridge mine in New South Wales.

The brilliant play of color, or “fire,” in these dark gems, along with their relative scarcity, causes them to be worth over $2300 per carat.

In the 1950s, minerologist Arthur C.D. Paine encountered an unusual brownish stone in Myanmar (Burma) that turned out to be one of the planet’s rarest gems. For decades, only two cut specimens were known to exist, causing the jewel to be more or less “priceless.”

In recent years, a few more crystals have been found. If you’re lucky enough to find one on the market, expect to pay $50,000 to $60,000 per carat for this orange- to red-brown gem.

Another precious stone in the same family as Taaffeite, this stone’s color ranges from a brilliant greenish gray to purple. Musgravite was discovered in 1967 in the Musgrave Range of Southern Australia, and for many years there were only eight known specimens.

Recently, small quantities of Musgravite have been located in Greenland, Antarctica, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and Tanzania. Don’t let this new “surplus” fool you, though: this incredibly hard stone is still exceedingly rare, fetching $35,000 – or more – per carat.

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